It was a cold, rainy Saturday morning when a dozen women gathered in the corner of Pruitt's Convenience Store on TX-36 in Gatesville in central Texas. But their goal was to bring a little warmth, and to maintain a mother-child connection, to the Hilltop Unit, a women's prison just a half mile up the road.
"Our program is at five women's prisons in Texas," said Women’s Storybook Project of Texas founder Judith Dullnig as she and her volunteers traveled through prison security to an education building on a campus that dates back to the 1890s.
Entering its 15th year, the Storybook Project rewards inmates who have maintained good behavior behind bars with a chance to reach out to the children: kids whose moms’ crimes and bad choices left behind. The volunteers arrive with dozens of children's books, the inmates are allowed to choose the books that best fit their children and age, their voices are recorded reading the books, the voices are burned to CD's, which are mailed to the children and their guardians wherever they might be in the United States.
They are women like Lucy Beasley of Fort Worth.
"Drugs. Selling drugs, yes," she said of her reason for being in prison and having to leave a 5-year-old boy with relatives.
Or Myeisha Garcia from Commerce, Texas, serving a 10-year sentence for manslaughter. She killed her boyfriend in a domestic violence fight she claims was self-defense. She's up for parole this year.
"We've come a long way, and I love you," she said as she finished reading and recording a book to her two girls who live with their grandmother.
"And then they get to hear their mother. So it's a pretty special thing," said Judith Dullnig who says the purpose is to keep moms, who will get out of prison someday, connected with their children: bridging the years with books, and recorders, and CDs, until reformed and repentant they can resume being a mom in person.
"That me being here has not changed my mind about who I am in their life, which is their mom," said Garcia.
"She knows she's doing something good for her child. But then when they go home, maybe that bond has been strengthened," said Dullnig.
"And just know that I'm doing all that I can to keep connected with you guys and to stay in touch with you," Garcia said in a video diary message recorded by WFAA. "And I love y’all and I miss you very much."
And in Commerce, Texas an hour northeast of Dallas last Wednesday, Judith Dullnig delivered Myeisha's voice, and the books she had chosen, in person.
Myeisha Garcia's daughters are 8 and 9 years old. She's been in prison for six years.
"It feels good. But I miss her. But it feels good. I seems like she's here," said Garcia's mother Debbie Hillard. "I would never want them to lose contact with their mom."
"I want to say I miss her and I love her, and I wish she was here right now," said Garcia's 8-year-old daughter Danaka.
But for inmates like Tina Dominguez from Waco, this is more complicated.
"I've been incarcerated practically my four-year-old's whole life. I've never even been to one of his birthdays," she said.
She's in prison for injury to one of her children, sentenced to 10 years. A paternal grandmother has legal custody now.
"It's my hope that when they hear it, they see me. They see the mom before I got hooked on drugs. The mom before I got arrested," she said. "I just want them to know that I love them. That they are important. They're amazing. They're everything that I ever wanted. And I’m sorry. I'm sorry that I was thoughtless and I was careless, and I was selfish. And I guess it's my way of letting them know that I'm still here."
And so, they read, hoping their children get a chance to listen and have a mom to look forward to.
"So everybody wins," said Dullnig. "The prison, good behavior, the mother, and especially the child."
"I'm sorry that mama's not home right now," said Dominguez in a video message to her children. "But sometimes, sometimes when you do bad things, you have to suffer the consequences. And right now that's what's happening."
Consequences learned. Consequences shared. Until the day a mom, and the child serving this sentence too, can try starting over again.